Posts by The Dogs Meevonks 584 publicly visible posts • joined 31 Aug 2017
Well, the national avg for a typical home is around the £280k mark I think. So 200,000,000 will buy 714 homes... before any of the other costs/expenses are taking into account... so you could probably lower that 10%... 643 homes.
If they build them... they could build about 1000 as (according to a home builder family friend) about 2/3 of the sale price is the build cost... But that's not factoring in any infrastructure that might be needed... ya know like roads, sewers and so forth.
I went to a gig in Brum in the latter part of 2022. By my own admission, I never knew about the ULEZ zone and my satnav was darting me around backstreets to avoid rush hour traffic... so I never even noticed signs about it.
Because I'd moved a few weeks earlier, and because of the postal strikes. My V5 was delayed in being updated and returned with the new address... and also because of postal strikes and mail redirection... any mail could take 3-4 weeks to get to us via the old address.
So in the new years... 32 days after being sent. A PCN arrived. This PCN gives you 28 days to respond, 14 if you want to pay the reduced charge.
I was happy to pay the £60, and informed the council of the mistake issuing the PCN to the correct address and asked for them to reissue it correctly.
They ignored it for 12 months.
Then in Jan of 2024, I get a letter trying to charge me triple the amount plus... they apologised for the delay in responding but stated they could disregard anything I said because it was longer than 28days. They also refused to issue an NoR which you need to appeal to the tribunal.
So I was advised to wait for the charge notice to be issued and a claim made through the traffic enforcement centre.
When that arrived (all of a sudden BCC are desperate to try and recover money for some reason) I filled out the witness statement telling them why and that they'd been asked to reissue to the correct address.
TEC cancelled the PCN... now BCC have to waste more money and resources deciding if they want to 'correctly' issue the PCN like they should have done 15 months ago. They've lost the fee for logging it with the TEC too.
All because of incompetence and bureaucracy, desperately trying to recover £190 instead of the £60 that was owed... how much more was wasted in work hours after ignoring it for twelve months, reviewing the reasons and deciding... to ignore their own mistake as justification for trying to screw over people for triple the amount... only to have to cancel the entire PCN and then waste more money/resources deciding if they want to reissue it to try and recover £60.
They did that in the city I grew up in (Milton Keynes) and it wasn't fit for anything. It also meant that for 30yrs the promise of bringing cable to the older parts of the city never happened... until they finally got around to laying FTTH a few years back.
Then I moved... and now my avg speeds are about 40Mb and FTTH isn't coming here for a couple more years.
Honestly can't wait... to tell sky to go f*ck themselves over their shitty service.
Thanks for the suggestion, but my dad had parkinsons and lewy body dementia. I gace up work for 7yrs to help my mum care for him and know exactly how bad it can get. The thought of having to go through it again and lose another 7yrs or so of my life... terrifies me. So, whilst it was too late to do anything about POA for him, we got it sorted for my mum about 10yrs ago. both me and my sister have POA if needed.
It's worth doing for parents... don't leave it too late.
I despair at the regression my mum is undergoing since getting covid 2yrs ago.
After 20yrs of being online, understanding the basics of computers and so forth... She now can't tell the difference between email and various messaging services.
Last year, she had some scammer message her through facebook via a compromised account of a friend... She mentioned to me that she'd not heard from him in ages and that he was 'very chatty' which was unusual to me.
After taking a look at the messages... I spotted all of the signs of the build up to the scam and told her so, I said to email him or call him to let him know his account had been hacked.
She messaged him... through facebook... to the scammer to tell him about the scammer.
Cue facepalm emoji.
I had her come to live with me 18 months ago as she's now in her late 70's and needs some extra help... at least 5 times a week, I have to deal with some ultra simple task that she's no longer capable of understanding... I can't tell if it's cognitive decline due to age, covid or early onset dementia... and she point blank refuses to see anyone about it to investigate. Which makes my life 10 times harder and more stressful than it needs to be.
I live in constant fear that she's going to be so utterly oblivious to scammers that will rob her blind... she blindly believes everything she reads on facebook... spends countless hrs each day glued to her phone and has shown me dozens of AI generated (and obviously fake) images that she thinks are real and show amazing and impossible things. I had to reset her phone to factory because she'd installed and given permissions to so much shit that her txts were utterly broken and she couldn't receive anything via text message anymore after giving some facebook/meta app permission to take over control of everything... and removing it and resetting defaults was the only way to fix it. She then accuses me of deleting all of her contacts because she can't tell the difference between a contact and an instant message anymore either.
Then there's the inability to see anything right under her nose on a screen... So when she asks me how to do something and I say 'click on the button marked XXXXXXX' she spends minutes looking for the big brightly coloured button in the middle of the screen and complaining that she can't see it even as I'm pointing right at it... and then claims it wasn't obvious to her.
Sorry for the rant... it's frustrating dealing with a parental unit who refuses to believe that they could ever be wrong about anything and who's default response to anything is denial.
Not going to mention names/companies. But I worked for a software developer about 18-19yrs ago. I was sent to Newbury (about a 100 mile trip) to fix an issue with a venue that couldn't be done remotely.
Upon arriving I was met with a system that kept crashing. As I was told to speak to the higher ups in tech support (who were too busy to go and sort it) before doing anything... I did so.
I was instructed to do about a dozen different things, none of which worked... and none of the suggestions involved actually opening up the system.... I'd suggested several times that I pull the system and open it up as it could be a hardware issue... This was dismissed and scoffed at, it was absolutely a software issue and they'd figure out what it was eventually. (every crash, they'd spend ages pouring over logs before making the next suggested change)
By the end of the day, it wasn't fixed... and I was told to find a cheap hotel for the night and be back there at 8am in the morning... because the support team were going home.
So I took matters into my own hands... pulled the system and stripped it down.
I took photos on my crappy little phone as evidence of what I found.
This thing was clogged up with dust, and the fan on the CPU cooler had failed... it was crashing because every time they tried to run tasks on it... it overheated and shut down, or after it was left on for a little while... heat soak caused the same issue.
I cleaned it out, went through their spares and old systems looking for a compatible heatsink... found one, cleaned it up and installed it. problem solved... support team very pissed at me the following morning.
But the venue, gave me a glowing report and gave the company a load of crap over the wasted day... I was lucky that one of the venue managers was present for a lot of the calls.
Sadly the company never learned the lesson... about 6 months later, started laying people off to cut costs. That same support team still held a grudge and kept sticking the knife in at every opportunity because I embarrassed them and I was one of those earmarked to be laid off.
The day after I was told... I never bothered going in and went straight into job hunt mode.
That's when I decided to become a contractor, I grabbed a temp job at a place I'd worked before to bring in money and was in a new contract with a 30% pay increase within 6 weeks... I've never looked back.
I switched to Zen, mainly based on the number of people who claimed they were amongst the best ISP's out there... and that it was worth paying a little extra.
All seemed fine for the first year.
Then slowly over the next 11 months, my speeds started dropping from the 73mbps I got... until I was barely getting low 20's... well below the min 39mbps guaranteed speeds.
When I called to log the problem... I was informed that they could see the speeds were dropping over that entire 11 months, but they did nothing to resolve the issue. It took weeks before it was resolved. We had a back and forth with their customer service staff behaving like antagonists... literally baiting me by making 'polite' but unreasonable demands to force me to accept all costs related to engineer call outs and refusing to do anything unless I accepted those costs.
It took the intervention of their line manager before things moved forward... and I ended up with months of credit due to their behaviour.
Eventually after a few visits and equipment needing replacing in the exchange and the local cabinet... were speeds back to normal.
Then about 8 months later... more issues, more attitude from their CS staff and once again, intervention from their manager and more credit applied to my account.
In the last 18 months I was with them... I probably only paid for 50% of it.
Caveat Emptor... don't believe the rando commentards on here raving about companies... they're not reliable.
I had the Sony Ericsson P990i as my first smart phone with a touchscreen and it was pretty decent. used it right up until 2011 after about 4-5yrs of reliable use.
Removable battery, could remove the numpad flip front with ease. Good call quality and a nice clear colour screen.
I actually miss phones that would last for days on a tiny battery and had a proper keyboard... If there was a decent alternative, I'd consider it for my next phone... I've had my Pixel 6 pro for about about 20 months so far and not impressed with the camera at all.
My first thought was that you'd googled them for effect.
As an avid reader of the famous five and secret seven books as a kid... I can't really remember anything about them apart from the dog Timmy.
I do however remember more about the comic strip presents 5 go mad in Dorset that I saw in my early teens... and the ex page three model Corrine Russell that had a part in it. :)
I did read it, i use firefox, ublock, noscript, privacy badger and so forth... I'm just sick and tired of these wargames and the constant back and forth with entitled wanker corps and their belief that they are entitled to my information and privacy, as well as the money in my wallet if I dare to object to their rightful ownership of it.
I use firefox with numerous plugins (noscript/ublock/privacy badger and so forth, plus others like clearurls and a couple of youtube ones to get rid of 'shorts' and enhance playback... I place all google sites in their own container too.
But I must confess that I'm sick and tired of playing this wargame... having to constantly battle against sites who want to invade my privacy and harvest everything about me without my consent.
So if I could 'nuke em' in some way... I would. :)
I've seen videos of people using youtube and content not loading, and then turning of their adblocker and the content loads perfectly.
I've tried this myself and have experienced exactly the same thing.
So you'll have to forgive me if I assume that google are a bunch of lying, wankers who have declared war on anyone who dares to try and stop their invasive, toxic behaviours. They only have themselves to blame for people wanting to block them, because they're toxic, they're entitled and think they have a right to our data, our privacy and to force feed us whatever any fucker is willing to pay them to do... whether we like it or not.
Fuck the ad industry and those that support their practices.
Nuke em from orbit... it's the only way to be sure.
People do just that... I know because I've done it. It cost £30 for a cheap basic printer and about £70 for new ink. So I'd give the printer away via freecycle in my area and get a replacement. Then I discovered 3rd party inks and started running into warnings and issues like this one. It's not just HP who pull this shit. Lexmark gave me constant warnings every time I used my printer, Epson do the same.
I know it's daft... but last year I signed up for the Epson ready print... £1.99 a month, £23.88 a year, 50 pages a month or roll over what's left for the next month. I don't print 600 pages in a year now, and I'm trying to move away from this disposable culture and try to be a little greener... so solar panels and battery storage installed, extra insulation in the house and my next car will be a hybrid. Reducing plastic waste, recycling as much as possible.
But nothing would ever convince me to touch anything from HP ever again.
Was he ever actually in intensive care? I can't recall now as it's been long overshadow by his constant lies, deceit and corruption... so anything he says can easily be assumed to be utter bollocks... and whilst he was slinging praise at the NHS for his care in a nice private room... he was also laundering about 1 billion pounds through the NHS to friends and crones for defective PPE.
I thought I'd finally got it just before xmas. My mum came down with something and I caught it a few days later. But she tested after she'd been ill for 4 days and got a negative test. My brother in law caught it from her too and he tested negative.
Whatever it was, it mirrored some covid symptoms and wiped everyone out for the better part of 3-4 weeks. Started with a cough and sore throat, then headaches and extreme tiredness... after about 10-12 days it turned into a nasty cold for a further 10-12 days.
Seems there's some viral thing going about this winter that's not covid but it really contagious. My whole family has had it, as have friends and not one of them has tested positive for covid.
Selfish, ignorant and entitled people do selfish, ignorant and entitled things... They only care about themselves, they lack the cognitive ability to be able to understand how these things spread and what can be done to mitigate it.
Ironically... covid has been proven to affect cognitive ability thus compounding the problem in those who have had it, more than once or even suffer with long covid.
People like this always remind me of the saying... some people are too stupid to know how stupid they are, and thus display supreme confidence and arrogance about their assumed superiority on everything.
I wanted to watch their rings of power... I pay for prime.
I couldn't because I use a VPN... so I downloaded it instead.
There are a few shows/movies that are exclusive to prime that I enjoy... and I've never actually watched them on prime. I've watched them dozens of times.
So why was I paying for the service... because I actually want to pay for content that I enjoy.
But these fuckers are literally forcing me to go back to old habits... and I'm more than happy to do so.
It's time to ditch amazon entirely... not just because of this. But because the service they offer in general is just a really bad value for money experience.
Quality of products has gone through the floor as decent brands abandon the marketplace, leaving the site flooded with cheap chinese knock-off garbage that can not only be a waste of money... but also potentially dangerous. See the recent Louis Rossman vids for examples of dangerous quality products.
Then there's reviews... they can't be trusted because you can list an item that's good... earn thousands of reviews and then swap out the item for something else and you keep the reviews for entirely different products. People see the reviews and think it's positive, they don;t actually read the reviews to see if the review is talking about the same product now being sold.
My yearly sub is due this month and I'm cancelling it. I don;t watch prime video anymore because the gui is so bad it's hard to find anything, they removed your ability to see just what's free to prime users... so they can try and steer you towards more purchases... renting anything costs more than actually buying a physical copy on bluray and as with all 'digital' purchases, anything you buy can be taken from you at a later date.
The only way to win, is not to play.
So I've switched more and more to local businesses, gone direct to brands sites to buy direct or from their approved resellers. I've cut what I spent on amazon by more than 50% this year.... in fact, just 1 of the xmas presents I bought was from amazon... and that was a gift card for my brother in law who wanted something specific he can't get locally.
I'm so done with the enshitification of everything.
Look... I've literally... and I do mean literally, in the last few months got access to a 5G signal in spite of having a 5G phones for the last 4yrs.
Why you might wonder.
Because I was using a shitty provider (giffgaff) who used the backend services of another shitty provider. I lived in a large city until Sept 2022 and could get a reasonable 4G signal over most of the city.
Then I moved to a small town near the coast of North Wales... I couldn't even get a signal in town, let alone a decent one anywhere else within 20 miles.
So I did some proper checking out of service providers and found that they only one that had a decent signal in my entire area was EE.
So then begins the hunt for a sim only deal from some one who uses EE's backend services and actually offers the whole spectrum and not part of it... Because there are some out there who can't give you a proper service whilst using the same providers.
What did I end up with.
1pmobile... I kid you not. The cheapest, most basic sim only service around gives you the best deal and the best service.
£10 a month, unltd calls/txts and 25GB data and a full 5G signal everywhere I go, and a decent 4G one outside of towns/villages. I can finally walk down into town and not hit a phone dead zone.
So FFS... before you start adding tens of thousands more towers and repeaters... how about you... I don't know... ROLL OUT 5G Properly you utter cunts!!! Hell, even a decent 4G rollout to the whole country would be a good place to fucking start.
Don't be silly, buttons cost extra, and they're 9.99 each. And for some reason you also need to purchase the button hole maker for a further 49.99 because 3rd party hole makers invalidate your warranty as does making holes in anything that we still own, because you only have a license to wear the mac on dry days.
I still remember opening my original X-Wing box with multiple 1.44mb disks and a huge manual. I also remember selling a huge box of games on ebay about 20yrs ago for almost nothing... at least 20-30 titles, original boxes... some disk, some CD.
I still have a huge stack of CD/DVD based PC games in my home office... including some of those dodgy ones with the CDrootkit program on them that killed CDRW drives... lost a few drives to that before it was discovered.
We found the best way to combat that was to setup your own server on a work lan and ADSL... So we had the advantage.
We did stuff like that right up until the mid-late 2000's and it even proved to be beneficial for the company.
Once with an old BF42 server running the desert combat mod that I used to be involved with just outside of the firewall, we kept getting random stalls/lag of about 1s.
After some investigating by the ISP/BT they found a piece of misconfigured equipment in the exchange.
So that was used as a great selling point and justification for the boss to allow us to keep running a mini game server on the site. :)
It helped having a cool boss too.
Whilst Wolfenstein 3D was my first experience of FPS gaming a year or two earlier... Doom was certainly the most memorable. Installed on a work computer that we played out of hours that had no sound card installed, and then on a very used 386 that I got and managed to install a soundcard on. We'd swap discs with fan made maps/levels and mods.
Then a few yrs later we had Quake... which advanced the graphics further and with true 3D modelled objects. It was also when I first started to get online through work as it would be 98 before I had a PC with modem at home. So of course we downloaded mods for quake to add star wars characters and sounds. We also downloaded soundpacks for Worms to make them sound like Simpsons characters and so forth. Of course we can't forget games like Dark Forces either... that I probably played more than any other.
Such innocent fun... now it's all 9.99 for a soundpack or a new skin for your character... thank fuck for the hats with skulls on.
Recently replaced a fan adapted versions of Dark Forces and Quake with better graphics.
I'm also still playing games like Tie Fighter and X-Wing Alliance thanks to the work over at the x-wing alliance upgrade project... taking the originals and making them look amazing once more. I hear that there's work on the original X-Wing game and hopefully X-Wing Vs Tie Fighter too.
You mean getting stoned and making a stupid offer to buy a platform to stroke his ego and then realising it wasn't worth what he offered... but he made an ironclad agreement and has to honour it... so he strikes a deal with 3rd parties and authoritarian regimes to help fund it... to give them access to the data on users who may be critical of their regimes... and to set about destroying a platform that gives global reach and allows activists to mobilise and share in real time, data and information to organise and protest such regimes and fascist leaning figures.
No... aside from that... I can't think of anything else either.
Between those who don't understand HOW unions work, and those that desperately simp for ole musky.... this comments section has been very painful to read today.
It's not usually this bad, but the wilfully ignorant have been out in force today. I suspect that as soon as anything muskrat related gets published a rallying cry goes out on shitter for the masses to assemble to defend his honour.
But it is fun seeing them downvoted to oblivion whilst complaining about the downvotes and how they're misunderstood or victimised, or that they're basically saying the same thing as the people they're arguing against (they're not and they can't understand why they're not)
Then seeing those same sad little simps desperately trying to downvote everyone who dares to disagree with their simping... and unhappy that they're simply outnumbered.... so they start slinging what they think are insults like 'left wing' or 'woke' or 'liberal' and all of the variations of things like that... You know... things they think are insults but are actually positive things that make others just better, kinder, more empathetic with the rest of society in general... and they can't understand that because all they know is greed, selfishness, taking and never giving... because that's what they worship, and that's why they're such sad little simps for billionaires.
I don't have an MS account for any of my windows 10 systems. I also use programs like OOUS10 to clear out and block their shite. Then there's classic shell to return a proper start menu.
So when I wanted to install a new HP printer a few years ago... you wouldn't believe the hoops I had to jump through to get drivers.
Epson didn't actually have them for download, instead they insisted you downloaded them from the MS store... which I couldn't, because no account and it's been disabled on my system.
It took hrs of searching and looking around before I finally found some... unlisted and hidden on HP's fucking site.
Then the printer didn't fucking work, so I sent it back and got an Epson instead... which installed in seconds.
I should have learned my lesson 25yrs ago when I got my first HP printer and it was shite.
The cold hard reality is this... if you only use it to keep in touch with friends, and those friends REFUSE to use any other means of communicating. then are they 'really' friends?
I deleted facebook 11 or 12 yrs ago for the 2nd time... the first was in 2008 after I was talked into using it 7-8 months earlier by work colleagues.
I do not miss it at all, it's a toxic wasteland of shit and is bad for your mental health.
For the next 7yrs... I had to put up with so called friends moaning 'but you're not on facebook' as justification for not making an effort to keep in touch.
So I delivered a final statement to them all... I will only make an effort with people who make an effort and demanding that I use facebook for your convenience is the opposite of making an effort.
Guess how many I've spoken with since 2019.
Zero...
They weren't friends... they were people I used to be friends with as teenagers and who drifted out of each others lives 25yrs ago... desperately trying to hang on to their youth in middle age.
I moved on, made new friends found people who were interested in the same things I am now rather than reminiscing over past shared experiences.
I highly recommend dropping anyone who refuses to make the effort to stay in touch if you choose not to participate in being the product of some billionaires fetish... every excuse they offer is based in their laziness and ignorance.
Emby is the same with TV shows + movies (jellyfin is a fork of emby after all)
What you need to do is go and look over on something like the tv database, to see if they've got the movie listed as a special. They usually do. So I create a Season 0 folder in the TV shows folder and rename the movie to S00Exx (with x being what the tvdb says). It should then scrape the metadata for it.
I don't have any issues with metadata scraping, you just have to ensure your file naming follows a certain rules.
I used to be involved with 'emby' back in the late 2000's when it started off as a plugin called video browser for Vista Media Centre... It later became Media Browser or 'MB' and later 'emby'
I left many years ago after butting heads with some others over the stupidity of certain design and direction choices.... in spite of being shouted down, screamed at and called all sorts of unpleasant things. Every single suggestion I made to streamline the UI and make the interface work better... was quietly implemented.
But I'd had enough of people who could program but had little idea about decent UI design... I like to think I influenced them enough to push it in the right direction... But there still seems to be an element that is stuck in the 'if it works on a touchscreen it's good enough for everything' mentality.
Even given my gripes with some of the idiots running the show over there at emby... I'd still choose it over anything else, because it's not harvesting your data, it's not sharing that data insidiously with everyone else and this is not the first time plex has introduced some nasty little tracking 'feature' into their software.
I've also got a lifetime sub because of that involvement and years of testing and developing it.
So my suggestion is ditch plex, give emby a try... heck, even give jellyfin a try (it's a fork of emby after all), it's lacking a lot of the features..
I have tried Plex... I switched to it and ran it alongside emby for about 6 months after I cut ties... there were many things to like about it back then. But... that was also when they decided to introduce their first attempt at tracking what users were watching and storing on their media servers... so I dropped it there and then.
I was building some new systems a few years back during the early days of the pandemic.
I'd built one in Jan, and in April was retasking that build into my mediaserver (that was still on Windows 7 and AMD FX)
The new build was my personal gaming rig... and I'd decided to splash the cash a little as a treat.
That meant X570 motherboard and the 3800X CPU along with 64GB of DDR4 3600mhz, new case, new storage, new PSU... aside from the GPU... new everything.
So I'd got a 500GB Sabrent rocket PCI-E4.0 nvme drive for the OS. On my previous build, I had a 250GB WD Black (PCI-E3.0) for the OS.
I use anydesk to remote into my server.
Some of you might be able to figure out what happened next already.
After installing the OS and going back and forth to my home office for the next 6hrs or so whilst it updated windows 10 and I got programs and so forth installed... Remember I was retasking the other system as my mediaserver. So I was working on 2 systems at the same time... one remotely.
So at some point... I checked on storage space left on the OS drive on my new gaming rig.
Wait... that's only showing up as 250GB... I checked the packaging... it should be 500GB. It was late, I was tired and I was now annoyed.
I fired of a quick email to the seller, letting them know they shipped me the wrong drive and went to bed.
The following morning I boot up the system and notice it is actually 500GB.
Cue a WTF moment... before it dawns on me that I was looking at the drive on the server the night before, because I was logged in remotely.
Cue an Oh Shit moment as I realise I fired of an email that was a little blunt and passive aggressive.
Thankfully it was a weekend now... So I fired of a 2nd email, profusely apologising and explaining my stupidity. I had a reply on Monday... with them basically having a good chuckle at my expense. I even added the story to my review of the product.
It doesn't matter how smart you think you are, how much experience and knowledge you have... you can still pull a moment like that out of your arse. What matters is how you handle it... it doesn't hurt to have a bit of a chuckle at yourself from time to time.
I worked for Halifax about 25yrs ago... and they tried that shit with me... you've got to have a Halifax account for your Halifax wages.
OK... so I then set up a standing order to transfer the entire amount less a few quid in rounding errors each month the day after payday... cut up the debit card and never once used it for anything else... those rounding errors, I'd leave in there for a little extra towards xmas. :)
I forgot about the account after I left for years, and then moved... when I remembered, I asked them to close it. They refused and said I had to go into a branch in person to do it. So I did... they refused because I didn't have ID that matched the address on file and I'd never bothered to remember things like pin numbers or passwords from an account I'd not used in 6-7yrs.
It's probably still sitting there 16yrs later.
Because companies like google, deliberately broke google apps/sites from working within firefox and other browsers... to try and force (con) people into using it.
I had to use chrome about 10yrs ago just to be able to use hangouts... Because they broke it with firefox. Joke was on them though... I used chrome only to log into the old Google+ account so I could access hangouts with my friends. and kept using firefox for everything else.
Then there was sky, who only allowed to use the sky go site with IE/Edge because they only allowed silverlight to watch anything.
Utter fuckery from both companies... and my response was simple... find alternate ways to access the content I want... be it legit or not.
How about forgetting that your headphones auto connect to devices when turned on... and instead of connecting to your TV in your bedroom when you are laid up in bed recovering from surgery... it connected to your partners device... who was watching some weird Korean soap they've become addicted to... and you're trying to figure out why an episode of The Expanse is in Korean and the settings say it's already in English.
Yeah... took me a good 5-10 mins to figure that one out in my drug induced haze of post operative bliss.... I don't miss the discomfort... but I do miss the bliss. :)
Then I'd argue that the punishment doesn't exceed the benefit... in savings or profits. They'll only change from greed over people when forced to... Maybe making the directors/board/shareholders culpable with criminal charges and mandatory minimum sentences.
I'm not an expert obviously... but it's the only way to force them to stop... wallet or liberty... preferably both. :)
All capitalist companies care about is money... So the answer is simple. You make the punishment for breaking laws/regs such as making employee benefits unreasonable, or selling consumer products that aren't fit for purpose.. so astronomically high that it is no longer in a corporations interests to violate them.
Make the default punishment, 10x the saving. You deny 3000 people, 10,000 in their benefit... that's not 30 million they have to pay out... it's 300 million.
Hitting them in the bottom line is the only thing they will understand and it's the only way they will ever make changes and stop these devious anti employer and anti consumer practices.
Here's how many adverts I watch.
Zero... it's zero, it's been zero for years, it will always be zero as long as I have control over what I'm looking at.
Broadcast TV... time shifting. I will pause live TV for 10-15 mins so that I can skip through the adverts, or I simply record and watch later so I can do the same thing.
Online - I've been quite vocal about my use of ad/script/cookie blockers, forcing https everywhere and using a VPN 24/7 even though it means places might become unavailable to me. The BBC block you if you have a VPN now, as do Netflix once more... and by block, I mean... can't even load the site if connected.
Print - LOL... who buys print anymore?
This is the consequence of a toxic advertising industry... I will NEVER stop blocking them, making whatever data they can collect as worthless as possible.
Next up... I'm gonna put together a pihole I think, was toying with the idea of getting one to run home assistant for my solar/battery system to maximise charging cycles at cheap rates. So maybe I can do both on the same raspPi
Do you work in the ad industry or something... because you're fawning over their bullshit like you get paid too.
If a site wants to block me for daring to use plugins that help protect my privacy from their tracking and data collection by multiple 3rd parties... I'll go somewhere else for the information I'm looking for. I don't OWE them jack shit. They have NO entitlement to invade my privacy EVER.
They created this clusterfuck, they decided to declare war to try and force their insidious ads onto everyone... and if it's a war... anything goes... everything is a legitimate target (according to the media and western backed terrorist states)
So lets fuck their shit up
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